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PASTEUR'S  LIFE  AND  WORK 


m  RELATION  TO  THE 


ADVANCEMENT  OF  MEDICAL  SCIENCE 


BY 


L.  A.  STIMSON,  M.D. 


VICB-PKEESIDENT  N.  Y.  ACADEMV  OF  MEDICINE  ;  PROFESSOR  OF  SITKGERV,  UNIVHRSITV 
OF  THE  CITY  OF  NEW  YORK 


NEW  YORK 
Press  of  STETTINER,  LAMBERT  &  CO. 
22,  24  &  26  Reaoe  Street 
1893 


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Columbia  ^nibers;itj> 
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Digitized  by  tine  Internet  Arciiive 

in  2010  with  funding  from 

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http://www.archive.org/details/pasteurslifeworkOOstim 


PASTEUR'S  LIFE  AND  WORK 


IN  RELATION  TO  THE 


ADVANCEMENT  OF  MEDICAL  SCIENCE 


BY 


L.  A.  STIMSON,  M.D. 


VICE-PXEESIDEXT  N.  T.  ACADEIT?  OF  MEDICINE  ;   PROFESSOR  OF  SURGERY,  UNIVERSITY 
OF  THE  CITY  OF  NEW  YORK 


NEV/   YORK 

Press  of  STETTINER,  LAMBERT  &  CO. 

22.  24  &  26  Reade  Street 

1S93 


Pasteur's  Life  and  Work 

IN  RELATION  TO  THE  ADVANCEMENT  OF 
MEDICAL  SCIENCE.' 


Mr.  President  and  Fellotvs  of  the  Neiv  York  Academy  of 
Medicine : 

Among  the  many  wise  provisions  of  those  who  have 
brought  this  Academy  to  its  present  standard  of  intellec- 
tual and  material  prosperity  must  be  counted  that  which 
provides  for  this  annual  reunion  of  its  members,  in  order 
that,  laying  aside  for  the  moment  the  special  interests  that 
absorb  them  in  the  various  Sections  during  the  year,  they 
may  turn  their  attention  to  some  matter  of  general  inte- 
rest and  wider  import.  The  same  wise  foresight  throws 
open  the  doors  to  our  non-professional  friends  ;  and  in 
order  that  they  may  be  not  only  welcome,  but  also  inte- 
rested in  our  proceedings,  it  suggests  that  the  topic  of 
the  evening  and  its  treatment  should  be  such  that  the  de- 
ficiencies of  their  training  and  of  their  opportunities  may 
not  wholly  deprive  them  of  the  possibility  of  finding 
pleasure  therein. 

In  casting  about  for  a  subject  that  would  meet  the  re- 
quirements of  the  occasion,  that  would  interest  both  the 
professional  and  the  non-professional  hearer,  and  that 
possessed  sufficient  intrinsic  merit  to  compensate  for  de- 
fects in  its  presentation,  I  was  reminded  that  nothing  is 
more  interesting  than  to  review  the  course  of  one  of  the 
masters  of  science,  to  receive  his  exposition  of  the  princi- 
ples of  his  method,  to  study  their  illustration  in  examples 
drawn  from  his  own  experience,  to  trace  the  operation  of 

'  Anniversary  Discourse  before  the  New  York  Academy  of  Medicine,  No- 
vember 17th,  1892.     Reprinted  from  Transactions. 


4  StimsoN  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work. 

his  mind,  to  learn  how  even  mistakes  ma^  be  profitable 
and  instructive,  and  to  appreciate  at  what  price  notable 
discoveries  and  solid  progress  are  made. 

The  story  of  the  life  of  such  an  one  should  be  of  interest 
to  all,  and  if  it  dealt  with  the  broader  problems  of  our 
own  science  the  requirements  of  this  occasion  would  be 
fully  met  by  it. 

Furthermore,  there  is  in  the  review  of  the  progress  of 
any  science  or  of  the  development  of  any  great  idea  or 
broad  principle    something  far  more  worthy   of   respect 
and  attention  than  the  simple  personal  element  or  the  mo- 
mentary interest  of  the  recital.     In  the  world  of  ideas  the 
novelty  of  to-day  becomes  the  commonplace  of  to-morrow. 
The  ideas  which  came  like  revelations  or  inspirations  to 
our  fathers  are  fed  to  us  in  our  school  books,  and  appear 
to  us  to  have  existed,  like  the  alphabet  or  the  solar  sys- 
tem, from  the  beginning  of  the  world.     As  we  read  the 
history  of  a  past  removed  from  us,  perhaps,  by  but  a  few 
generations,    we   are   amazed  that   men's  actions  should 
have  been  determined  by  such  faulty  notions  of  political, 
economical,  or  religious  principles,  and   that  they  could 
have  been  so  blind  to  what  is  now  so  clear.    And  when  we 
read  books  that  within  a  few  years  have  revolutionized 
thought,  that  have  been  received  and  acclaimed  almost  as 
if  they  had  been  divinely  inspired,  we  ask  ourselves  in 
vain  in  what  the  novelty  and   the  originalit}'-  could  have 
consisted,   so    commonplace,   so   trite   even,  have   those 
novel  and  original  ideas  become.     It  therefore  becomes 
a  pious  duty  to  those  who  have  so  raised  the  general  level 
of  our  knowledge  or  of  our  principles,  that  while  we  en- 
joy the  fruits  of  their  labors  we  should  still  be  mindful  of 
their  part  in  it  and  should  bear  their  names  in  constant 
and  grateful  remembrance. 

The  science  of  medicine  is  so  closely  interwoven  with 
other  sciences,  so  many  of  its  most  important  advances 
have  been  made  by  the  aid  of  those  whose  names  are  not 
upon  its  roll  of  members,  that  we  shall  never  be  at  a  loss 
to  find  a  worthy  and  appropriate  subject  for  our  study, 


Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work.  5 

our  honor,  and  our  gratitude  ;  and  there  is  a  peculiar 
propriety  in  the  public  and  professional  recognition  of 
our  obligations  to  those  who  are  not  strictly  of  us.  I  of- 
fer no  excuse,  therefore,  for  asking  your  attention  this 
evening  to  a  brief  review  of  the  life  and  accomplishments 
of  a  man  who  is  by  profession  a  chemist  and  whose  only 
medical  title  is  that  of  honorary  membership  in  an  acade- 
my of  medicine.  And  yet,  although  so  widely  removed 
from  us  by  training  and  occupation,  it  has  fallen  to  his  lot^ 
in  a  larger  measure,  perhaps,  than  to  that  of  any  other 
man,  to  open  important  pathways  of  research  in  medicine 
and  to  establish  a  doctrine  of  causation  of  disease  upon 
which  a  mighty  and  efficient  structure  of  prevention  and 
cure  has  already  been  erected.  Upon  principles  discov- 
ered and  established  by  him  rests  the  modern  treatment 
of  surgical  wounds,  with  the  saving  already  effected  of 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  lives,  and  to  him  a  few  years 
ago  (1876)  Prof,  Tyndall  wrote  in  these  words  :  "  For  the 
first  time  in  the  history  of  science  we  have  the  right  to 
cherish  the  sure  and  certain  hope  that,  in  respect  to  epi- 
demic diseases,  medicine  will  soon  be  delivered  from  em- 
piricism and  placed  on  a  really  scientific  basis.  When 
that  great  day  shall  come,  humanity,  in  my  opinion,  will 
recognize  thatit  is  to  you  that  the  greatest  part  of  its  grati- 
tude is  due."  And  at  the  meeting,  last  summer,  of  the  Brit- 
ish Medical  Association,  the  author  of  the  address  on  bac- 
teriology expressed  the  gratitude  of  the  world  to  him  as 
the  one  whose  genius  had  raised  that  branch  of  study  to 
the  rank  of  a  science.  Let  us,  then,  add  to-night  our  trib- 
ute of  homage  and  gratitude  to 

LOUIS   PASTEUR. 

Born  in  December,  1822,  in  a  village  near  the  central 
eastern  frontier  of  France,  of  humble  parents  who  labored 
and  sacrificed  to  advance  his  education  as  though  they 
foresaw  his  future,  we  find  him  at  the  age  of  eighteen 
already  a  tutor  in  the  college  of  Besangon,  which  had  just 
given  him  his  baccalaureate  degree,  with  a  reputation  es- 


6  Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work. 

tablished  for  exceptional  ability  and  industr3^  j^d  with  a 
maturity  of  character  far  beyond  his  years.  His  position 
was  a  modest  one  :  it  lodged  and  fed  him  and  gave  him 
five  dollars  a  month  ;  but  it  also  gave  him  an  opportunity 
to  continue  his  studies,  and  it  placed  his  foot  upon  the 
first  round  of  that  wonderful  ladder  of  educational  and 
scientific  organization  which  offers  to  every  young  lad 
in  France  who  chooses  to  attempt  to  climb  it  a  sure  and 
certain  promise  of  rewards  and  honors,  in  accordance 
with  the  measure  of  his  ability  and  industry. 

Three  years  later  he  won  a  place  in  the  Ecole  Normale 
at  Paris,  where  almost  all  his  work  has  since  been  done, 
and  of  which  he  has  become  the  supreme  glory.  In  this 
great  school,  where  the  students  are  invited  rather  to 
independent  investigation  than  to  attendance  upon  meth- 
odical instruction,  Pasteur  found  both  stimulus  and  oppor- 
tunity for  the  gratification  of  his  passion  for  chemistry; 
and  it  is  interesting  and  suggestive  to  see  the  lad  em- 
ploying in  his  self-instruction  those  methods  of  close 
observation,  rigid  self-criticism,  and  control  experimenta- 
tion which  have  been  the  foundation  of  his  later  successes, 
and  displaying  the  same  skill  and  beauty  of  manipulation, 
the  same  strength  and  clearness  of  thought,  the  same 
absolute  honesty,  and  the  same  breadth  of  view.  A  single 
incident  may  be  quoted  in  illustration,  and  also  because 
it  was  the  first  step  in  his  long  line  of  research  and  dis- 
covery, each  subsequent  one  of  which  was  the  natural, 
logical  successor  of  those  which  had  preceded. 

Molecular  physics  and  chemistry,  and  the  structure 
and  polarity  of  crystals,  were  at  that  time  receiving  much 
attention,  and  it  was  held  by  some  of  Pasteur's  teachers 
that  in  the  arrangement  of  molecules  was  to  be  found  the 
explanation  of  all  chemical  and  allied  phenomena.  Into 
the  stud)^  of  this  subject  Pasteur  had  entered  with  his 
usual  ardor,  when  a  note  was  sent  to  the  Academic  des 
Sciences  by  the  mineralogist  Mitscherlich  which  threat- 
ened to  destroy  the  theory.  Mitscherlich  pointed  out 
that,  although   the   double   tartrate   and   paratartrate  of 


Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work.  7 

soda  and  ammonia  were  identical  in  chemical  composi- 
tion, specific  weight,  crystalline  form,  and  double  refrac- 
tion, yet,  while  the  tartrate  in  solution  deviated  the  beam 
of  polarized  light,  a  solution  of  the  paratartrate  did  not 
afiFect  it.  Apparently  the  admitted  identity  in  the  num- 
ber, arrangement,  and  distances  of  the  atoms  in  the  two 
substances  did  not  make  them  identical  in  all  respects. 

The  crystals  of  the  two  acids  and  of  their  compounds 
had  already  been  studied  and  described  in  great  detail. 
Pasteur  set  himself  to  repeat  the  investigation,  and  he 
discovered,  what  had  been  overlooked  by  all  others,  that 
the  crystals  of  tartaric  acid,  and  those  of  its  compounds, 
were  asymmetrical  in  this  sense,  that  if  one  was  split  in 
two  the  two  halves,  while  identical  in  form,  were  not 
superposable ;  they  were,  so  to  speak,  right-  and  left- 
handed  respectively  ;  each  was  identical  with  the  mirror 
image  of  the  other,  as  a  right  hand  is  identical  with  the 
reflection  of  a  left  hand  in  a  mirror.  A'  solution  of  these 
asymmetrical  tartaric  crystals  deviated  the  beam  of  po- 
larized light  to  the  right.  We  may,  for  convenience,  call 
them  right-handed  crystals.  The  crystals  of  paratartaric 
acid  he  found  to  be  symmetrical,  and,  as  has  been  al- 
ready said,  they  were  without  action  upon  polarized  light. 
But  on  examining  the  crystals  of  the  salt  formed  by  com- 
bining this  acid  with  soda  and  ammonia,  he  found,  to  his 
great  surprise  and  delight,  that  they  were  asymmetrical, 
and  asymmetrical  in  two  forms;  there  were  both  right- 
and  left-handed  crystals ;  and  a  solution  of  one  kind  devi- 
ated light  to  the  right,  and  a  solution  of  the  other  deviated 
it  to  the  left ;  when  they  were  mingled  the  effect  of  one 
neutralized  the  effect  of  the  other.  And  thus  the  objection 
raised  in  the  famous  note  of  Mitscherlich  was  answered. 

Pursuing  the  investigation,  he  found  a  new  form  of  tar- 
taric acid,  one  whose  crystals  were  left-handed,  and  which 
deviated  light  to  the  left.  He  made  known  his  discovery 
to  the  Academic  des  Sciences,  and  it  was  referred  at  once 
for  report  to  the  veteran  Biot,  the  discoverer  of  the 
polarization  of  chemical  substances.     He  summoned  Pas- 


8  Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work. 

teur  to  his  laboratory,  supplied  him  with  the  ac^ds  and 
bases,  and  told  him  to  prepare  the  crystals.  When  this 
had  been  done  he  bade  him  separate  the  alleged  right- 
handed  from  the  left-handed,  and  then,  pointing  to  each 
little  pile  in  turn,  he  said:  "  Do  you  declare  that  these 
will  deviate  the  light  to  the  right,  and  these  to  the  left?" 
On  receiving  an  affirmative  answer  he  at  once  prepared 
a  solution  of  each  and  applied  the  test,  and  as  the  pre- 
dicted result  appeared  the  illustrious  old  man  caught  the 
youth  in  his  arms,  saying:  "My  dear  young  friend,  I 
have  so  loved  Science  all  my  life  that  this  makes  m}'  heart 
throb." 

We  can  perhaps  gain  some  conception  of  the  sharpness 
of  the  scrutiny  that  enabled  Pasteur  to  recognize  these 
differences  from  a  remark  made  to  him  by  Mitscherlich. 
"  I  studied,"  said  the  latter,  "  those  two  salts,  in  their 
minutest  details,  with  so  much  care  and  assiduity  that  if 
you  discovered  anything  that  I  had  failed  to  find,  it  could 
only  have  been  by  the  guidance  of  a  preconceived  idea." 

The  path  thus  opened  was  followed  by  Pasteur  with 
results  that  were  most  suggestive  of  unsuspected  under- 
lying principles.  He  found  molecular  asymmetry  to  be 
the  characteristic,  the  stamp,  of  life ;  the  invariable,  though 
sometimes  hidden,  feature  of  all  substances  that  have  the 
most  influence  in  the  manifestations  of  vegetable  and 
animal  life  ;  it  is  the  line  of  demarkation  between  living 
and  dead  chemistry. 

One  of  the  observations  made  at  this  time  led  to  the 
next  and  most  important  step  in  his  career.  He  caused 
a  solution  of  the  paratartrate  of  ammonia  to  ferment,^ 
and  he  noticed  that,  as  the  process  advanced,  the  solu- 
tion, which  at  first  was  without  action  upon  polarized 
light,  gradually  deviated  the  plane  to  the  left.  Of  the  two 
forms  of  the  acid — the  right  and  left — of  which  the  salt 
was  composed,  only  the  former  was  broken  up  in  the 
process  ;  the  latter — the  left — remained  unchanged,  and 
constituted,  therefore,  the  bulk  of  the  solution. 

The  explanation  was  to  be  sought  in  the  nature  of  the 


Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work,  9 

process  of  fermentation.  He  had  proved  molecular  asym- 
metry to  be  peculiar  to  life,  to  living  chemistry  ;  he  found 
it  present  and  active  in  fermentation ;  he  sought  the  life 
from  which  it  came,  and  he  made  the  great  discovery  of 
the  agency  of  living  ferments.  At  one  stroke  he  swept 
away  all  the  old  theories,  including  that  of  Berzelius — the 
"  theory  of  contact  " — and  that  still  older  one  to  which 
Liebig  had  given  his  name  and  support,  and  which  was 
held  almost  universally  at  the  time — that  which  invoked 
an  atomic  movement  communicated  to  the  fermentable 
solution  by  dead  and  decomposing  albuminoid  matter. 
And  in  the  place  of  these  explanations  which  did  not  ex- 
plain, these  theories  each  of  which  was  limited  to  some 
restricted  group  of  fermentations,  these  solutions  whigh 
depended  upon  unproved  and  unprovable  assumptions 
and  each  of  which  raised  a  new  problem  to  be  solved,  he 
gave  us  a  simple  theory  which  rested  at  every  point  upon 
demonstrated  facts,  and  which  not  only  was  applicable  to 
all  recognized  fermentations,  but  also  vastly  enlarged  the 
boundaries  of  that  class,  bringing  within  it  other  processes 
whose  kinship  had  not  been  appreciated,  and  adding  a 
multitude  of  others  whose  existence  even  had  not  been 
suspected — the  theory,  namely,  that  the  process  is  one 
that  is  correlative  with  life,  not,  as  formerly  supposed, 
with  death,  and  that  all  these  varied  manifestations  have 
a  common  cause,  the  active  growth  and  multiplication  of 
minute  organisms. 

The  origin  of  these  minute  organized  ferments  was  so 
entirely  unknown,  their  appearance  in  the  fermenting 
liquids  was  so  mysterious,  that  Pasteur  felt  it  to  be  neces- 
sary to  investigate  the  theory  of  spontaneous  generation, 
which  was  invoked  by  so  many  to  account  for  their  ap- 
pearance. He  was  strongly  dissuaded  from  the  under- 
taking by  his  best  and  closest  scientific  friends,  on  the 
ground  that  the  problem  was  practically  insoluble ;  but  he 
persisted.  Never  had  he  worked  with  more  thorough- 
ness, greater  watchfulness,  keener  intelligence,  and 
sharper  insight  than    in    the    remarkable    experiments 


10  Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work. 

which  completely  overthrew  the  theory  and  laid  bare  the 
errors  and  defects  in  the  experiments  of  those  who  main- 
tained it.  The  story,  which  is  far  too  long  to  be  told 
here,  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  and  instructive  in  the 
history  of  scientific  research ;  it  has  been  told  and  retold 
many  times,  and  by  no  one  more  clearly  and  attractively 
than  by  Prof.  Tyndall,  who  has  himself  done  so  much  to 
extend  and  illustrate  it. 

Returning  from  this  scientific  excursion  to  continue  his 
work  on  fermentation,  Pasteur  took  what  may  be  called 
his  first  step  in  the  investigation  of  disease,  although  the 
disease  was  merely  one  of  certain  vegetable  products,  not 
of  man  or  even  of  beast.  He  studied  what  was  called  the 
disease  of  wines — that  sudden  change  which  occurs  some- 
times after  the  wine  has  been  kept  for  years,  and  which, 
within  a  few  weeks,  wholly  destroys  its  value.  It  is  suf- 
ficient here  to  say  that  he  found  the  change  to  be  a  fer- 
mentation, with  living,  organized  ferments,  and  that  he 
devised  efficient  preventive  measures  which  are  now  in 
general  use,  the  savings  effected  by  which  are  already 
estimated  by  millions. 

In  like  manner,  a  few  years  later,  he  relieved  the  manu- 
facture of  vinegar  and  that  of  beer  from  empiricism  and 
faulty  methods,  and  gave  them  the  security  of  a  scientific 
basis  ;  and  at  the  end  of  that  work  he  uttered,  with  the 
caution  so  characteristic  of  all  his  statements  made  before 
the  complete  demonstration,  this  suggestive  sentence  : 
"  The  etiology  of  contagious  diseases  is  perhaps  on  the 
eve  of  receiving  an  unexpected  light." 

His  success  in  detecting  and  removing  the  cause  of  the 
deterioration  of  wine  was  promptly  followed  by  another 
equally  important  economical  discovery,  one  which  affects 
even  more  forcibly  the  imagination  of  the  multitude  and 
the  emotions  and  the  resources  of  those  who  are  directly 
interested.  The  cultivation  of  the  silkworm  is  an  im- 
portant industry  in  France  and  Italy.  In  1853  France 
produced  twenty-six  million  kilogrammes  of  cocoons, 
worth  one  hundred   and   thirty  million  francs.     During 


Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work.  1 1 

the  following  decade  the  production  was  so  reduced  by  a 
disease  of  the  worms  that  in  1865  it  amounted  to  only 
one-sixth  of  what  it  had  been  in  1853 — a  money  loss  of 
more  than  one  hundred  million  francs  annually.  The  in- 
dustry was  threatened  with  total  destruction.  Innumer- 
able researches  into  the  cause  of  the  disease  had  been 
made,  remedies  of  the  most  varied  kinds  had  been  tried, 
and  the  French  Government  had  even  agreed  to  pay  to 
the  inventor  of  an  alleged  cure  five  hundred  thousand 
francs  if  it  should  prove  efficient.  But  nothing  availed, 
and  each  year  the  crop  was  smaller.  The  senate  appointed 
a  committee  to  consider  the  matter,  and  that  committee  at 
once  turned  to  Pasteur  and  asked  him  to  investigate  the 
disease.  To  his  objection  that  he  knew  nothing  about  it, 
that  he  had  never  even  seen  a  silkworm,  they  replied  : 
■"  So  much  the  better ;  you  will  approach  the  subject 
without  prejudice."  The  sacrifice  that  was  asked  of  him 
was  great,  for  it  required  the  prolonged  abandonment  of 
those  researches  in  fermentation  which  were  so  plainly 
leading  him  to  a  great  future  ;  but  he  saw  his  duty  and 
he  followed  it.  He  went  at  once  to  one  of  the  desolated 
districts,  and  was  so  impressed  by  the  sight  of  the  dis- 
tress occasioned  by  the  epidemic  that  he  resolved  not  to 
return  to  Paris  before  he  had  exhausted  every  line  of  in- 
vestigation. The  industry  is  one  that  is  carried  on  by  a 
multitude  of  small  proprietors,  not  by  a  few  large  cor- 
porations. Every  family  in  the  village  hatches  out  as 
many  worms  as  it  can  care  for,  filling  every  corner  in  the 
house  with  them,  from  the  kitchen  to  the  garret,  and  they 
watch  them  through  their  four  moultings  and  into  their 
cocoons  with  the  greatest  solicitude.  Day  and  night 
they  are  afoot,  to  give  them  food  and  protect  them  against 
changes  in  the  weather.  It  is  said  that  during  the  season 
the  salutation  of  the  villagers  when  they  meet  is  not 
"  How  are  you?"  but  "How  are  they?"  In  the  close 
struggle  for  life  in  those  older  communities  the  gain  or 
the  loss  of  the  little  revenue  from  a  few  silkworms  meant 


12  Stimson:  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work. 

in  many  a  family  comparative  ease  or  dangerous  want ; 
the  general  loss  of  a  crop  was  a  public  calamity. 

Into  the  details  of  the  investigation  we  cannot  now 
enter.  It  was  pursued  for  five  years  with  unflagging  de- 
votion and  in  the  face  of  much  criticism  and  even  active 
hostility.  His  critics  said  he  was  a  chemist  and  should 
confine  himself  to  his  profession.  They  were  surprised 
at  his  ignorance,  and  they  showed  that  his  efforts  were 
doomed  to  certain  failure.  But  these  prophecies  were 
not  realized,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  his  were.  A  year 
after  the  beginning  of  his  work  he  inspected  fourteen  par- 
cels of  eggs  and  the  moths  that  had  produced  them,  and 
gave  a  written  prediction  of  the  health  of  the  worms  that 
would  be  hatched  from  them  the  ensuing  year.  In  twelve 
out  of  the  fourteen  the  prediction  was  exactly  fulfilled, 
and  in  the  remaining  two  the  result  was  a  partial  con- 
firmation. He  found  the  cause  of  the  disease  to  be  the 
infection  of  the  worms  by  minute  corpuscles,  and  that 
even  an  apparently  healthy  moth  might  bear  the  infection 
within  itself,  and  that,  if  it  were  thus  infected,  the  eggs 
it  laid  would  produce  only  diseased,  useless  worms.  He 
showed  that  safety  was  to  be  had  only  by  killing  the 
moths  after  the  eggs  had  been  laid,  examining  their 
bodies  for  the  corpuscles,  and  hatching  only  those  eggs 
that  came  from  uninfected  moths. 

At  last  his  success  was  universally  admitted,  and  to 
this  day,  wherever  in  Europe  the  silkworm  is  cultivated, 
there  will  be  seen,  at  the  proper  season,  work  rooms 
filled  with  women  and  young  girls  busily  engaged  with 
their  microscopes  in  searching  for  and  throwing  out  the 
tainted  eggs  which  he  taught  them  to  recognize. 

Pasteur  emerged  from  this  trial  again  a  conqueror,  but 
also,  alas!  a  cripple.  In  the  midst  of  it,  October,  1868,  he 
was  stricken  with  hemiplegia  ;  he  slowly  regained  the  use 
of  his  limbs,  but  he  bears  to  this  day  its  traces  on  his  face 
and  in  his  gait. 

Such  was  his  life  up  to  the  age  of  fifty  years.  It  had 
been  one  long,  unbroken  record  of  successful  effort,  of 


Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work.  13 

brilliant  discoveries  in  science,  of  vast  additions  to  the 
economic  resources  of  the  world,  and  of  hearty  recogni- 
tion and  appreciation.  Had  it  ended  then,  he  would  still 
have  ranked  among  the  notables  of  science.  It  appeared, 
indeed,  to  be  near  its  end.  Crippled  in  body  by  paraly- 
sis, utterly  depressed  in  mind  by  the  terrible  calamities 
that  overwhelmed  his  country,  he  no  longer  had  the  heart 
or  the  strength  to  work.  And  yet  the  future  was  to  show 
that  the  past,  brilliant  as  it  had  been,  was  only  a  prepa- 
ration and  training  for  a  still  more  brilliant  series  of 
triumphs  in  a  field  of  the  highest  interest,  and  one,  too, 
from  which  he  would  naturally  have  supposed  himself  to 
be  wholly  excluded,  so  far  as  personal  effort  was  con- 
cerned, although  he  had  recognized  its  possible  connec- 
tion with  the  work  he  had  already  done. 

There  was  yet  to  be  accomplished  by  him  an  advance 
in  medical  science  similar  to  that  which  had  been  made  by 
his  countrymen  three-quarters  of  a  century  earlier,  an  ad- 
vance of  which  Virchow  has  said  :  "  The  year  1800  forms 
a  great  turning  point  in  medicine.  At  that  time,  under 
the  influence  of  the  French  Revolution,  the  great  Parisian 
school  was  formed  ;  and  we  must  give  honor  to  the  genius 
of  our  neighbors  that  they  were  able  at  one  stroke  to  dis- 
cover the  principles  of  an  entirely  new  science.  If  we 
now  see  medicine  developing  itself  in  the  greater  breadth 
of  objective  knowledge,  we  must  never  forget  that  the 
French  were  the  pioneers,  as  the  Germans  were  in  the 
middle  ages." 

The  same  province  of  France — Franche-Comt6,  or,  to 
speak  more  broadly.  Burgundy — which  had  sent  Bichat 
to  Paris  to  begin  the  work  of  which  Virchow  has  thus 
spoken,  had  now  sent  Pasteur  to  give  to  that  work  its  lat- 
est and  most  striking  development.  To  the  objective 
knowledge  of  the  changes  effected  by  disease  was  now  to 
be  added,  by  the  same  method  of  observation  and  experi- 
ment, a  knowledge  of  the|  cause  of  disease,  with  all  the 
vast  possibilities  of  prevention  and  cure  which  flow  from 
such  knowledge. 


14  Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work, 

The  germ  theory  of  disease  is  by  no  means  a.  new  one  ; 
its  origin,  indeed,  is  lost,  as  Virchow  says,  in  the  darkness 
of  the  middle  ages,  and  it  distinctly  appeared,  under  the 
name  contagium  animatum,  in  the  sixteenth  centur3^  But 
at  the  time  of  which  we  are  now  speaking  it  was  still  only 
a  theory.  Nineteen  years  ago,  in  the  Anniversary  Dis- 
course which  the  late  Prof.  Dalton  delivered  before  this 
Academy,  he  ventured,  as  he  said,  "to  cast  the  profes- 
sional horoscope  for  the  present  and  to  anticipate,  as 
nearly  as  may  be,  what  we  are  to  expect  from  it  in  the 
immediate  future."  He  found  that  "  if  there  be  any  one 
direction  in  which  progress  is  now  so  marked  as  to  con- 
stitute a  dominant  feature  of  the  present  state  of  medi- 
cine, and  to  embrace  a  practically  new  medical  idea,  I 
should  say  it  was  that  of  the  origin  and  propagation  of 
disease  by  independent  organic  germs.  Perhaps  it  would 
be  wrong  to  say  that  this  doctrine  is  even  yet  distinctly 
formulated.  It  is  certainly  far  from  being  definitely 
established  as  a  general  truth.  ...  So  far  it  exists  in  the 
form  rather  of  a  scientific  instinct  than  of  a  positive  be- 
lief, and  its  gray  light  hangs  about  the  edge  of  the  medi- 
cal horizon  like  the  coming  dawn  of  a  new  period." 

In  his  enumeration  of  the  facts  which  seemed  to  him  to 
justify  this  anticipation,  Dalton  laid  especial  stress  upon 
what  he  termed  Pasteur's  brilliant  researches  in  fermen- 
tation and  spontaneous  generation.  It  must  be  remem- 
bered that  these  researches  had  gone  far  beyond  the  sim- 
ple demonstration  of  the  presence  and  agency  of  germs. 
Pasteur  had  not  merely  found  the  germs  ;  he  had  isolated 
them,  had  devised  methods  to  obtain  pure  cultures,  and 
had  studied  their  natural  history  in  detail.  In  short,  he 
had  laid  the  foundation  of  the  modern  system  of  bacterio- 
logy. The  work  was  already  bearing  fruit  in  the  field  of 
medicine.  The  study  of  the  dust  of  the  air  and  the  proof 
of  its  agency  in  exciting  putrefaction  had  led  Lister  to 
the  antiseptic  treatment  of  wounds,  the  importance  of 
which  was  just  beginning  to  win  recognition.  The  inte- 
rest in  the  subject  was  especially  quickened  in  1872  by 


StimsoN  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work.  15 

some  striking  experiments  made  in  Paris  which  showed 
that  septicaemia  could  be  produced  in  animals  by  the  in- 
jection of  infinitesimal  quantities  of  the  blood  of  other 
animals  that  had  died  of  the  disease,  and  every  labora- 
tory was  occupied  with  the  subject.  In  the  address  just 
quoted  Prof.  Dalton  said  that  between  the  years  1870  and 
1873  more  than  two  hundred  papers  were  published  upon 
septicaemia.  Pasteur  naturally  followed  this  movement 
with  the  keenest  interest.  More  than  ten  years  previ- 
ously he  had  foreseen  the  possibility  and  had  expressed 
the  wish  that  he  might  be  able  to  carry  his  researches 
sufficiently  far  to  prepare  the  way  for  a  radical  investiga- 
tion into  the  origin  of  disease.  But  he  had  no  thought  of 
taking  a  personal  part  in  it,  for,  although  the  University 
of  Bonn  had  conferred  upon  him  the  degree  of  doctor  of 
medicine,  and  the  Paris  Academy  of  Medicine  had  made 
him  an  honorary  member,  he  was,  as  he  said,  not  a  physi- 
cian. He  limited  himself  to  making  suggestions  to  those 
who  sought  his  counsel.  I  recall  one  of  them,  made  at 
that  time,  that  the  dressings  to  be  applied  to  wounds 
should  be  sterilized  by  heat.  It  now  seems  almost  too 
commonplace  to  deserve  mention  ;  it  was  then  an  absolute 
novelty. 

After  a  year  or  two,  however,  the  interest  became  too 
deep  or  the  pressure  too  great,  and  he  entered  the  new 
field.  Faithful  to  his  method  of  experimentation,  as  con- 
trasted with  that  of  observation,  he  turned  first  to  certain 
infectious  diseases  of  animals,  for  in  them  observation 
and  inference  could  be  controlled  and  verified  by  experi- 
ment as  it  could  not  be  in  man. 

It  had  been  known  since  1850  that  the  blood  of  cattle 
affected  with  splenic  fever,  or  "  charbon,"  contained  vast 
numbers  of  a  rod-shaped  micro-organism  to  which  the 
name  bacteridiuvt  had  been  given.  The  disease  had  long 
been  prevalent  in  Europe,  and  in  France  alone  it  annually 
destroyed  horses,  cattle,  and  sheep  valued  at  from  fifteen 
to  twenty  millions  of  francs.  It  is  communicable  to  man, 
the  so-called  "  malignant  pustule  "  or  "  anthrax."    Davaine 


i6  Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work. 

and  Ra3^er  had  noted  in  1850  the  presence  of'the  bacilli 
in  the  blood,  but  had  drawn  no  inference  from  it.  Thir- 
teen years  later  Davaine  was  reminded  of  them  by  read- 
ing- Pasteur's  description  of  the  microbe  of  butyric  fer- 
mentation, and  suggested,  in  a  communication  to  the 
Academie  des  Sciences,  that  they  were  the  cause  of  the 
disease.  The  matter  had  been  rather  tepidly  discussed 
from  time  to  time  for  several  years,  experiments  had 
yielded  conflicting  results,  and  the  claim  of  a  causal  rela- 
tion between  the  bacillus  and  the  disease  was  far  from  hav- 
ing been  established.  The  question  derives  a  peculiarinte- 
rest  from  the  fact  that  in  1876  it  became  the  subject  of 
some  of  the  earliest  studies  in  bacteriology  of  one  whose 
fame  in  connection  with  that  branch  of  science  has  since 
become  world-wide — Prof.  Koch.  In  the  same  year  Pas- 
teur began  his  investigation,  and  in  the  following  year  he 
was  able  not  only  to  demonstrate  the  agenc}^  of  the  bacil- 
lus in  producing  the  disease,  but  also  to  explain  the  con- 
tradictory results  obtained  by  previous  experimenters. 
He  showed  that  the  bacillus,  to  employ  his  own  term,  was 
aerobic — it  needed  free  oxygen  to  live — and  that  conse- 
quently the  death  of  the  animal,  by  cutting  off  the  supply 
of  free  oxygen,  led  to  the  death  of  most  of  the  bacilli 
within  it  in  a  few  hours.  According,  therefore,  to  the 
length  of  time  that  had  elapsed  between  the  death  of  the 
animal  and  the  taking  of  its  blood  for  inoculation  would 
the  experiment  succeed  or  fail.  He  showed  that  the 
deaths  that  followed  the  late  inoculations  were  due  to  an 
anaerobic  microbe — one  that  did  not  need  free  oxygen — 
and  thus  was  explained  the  absence  of  the  anthrax  bacillus 
from  the  bodies  of  those  victims  ;  the  deaths  were  due  to 
septicasmia,  not  to  charbon.  The  investigation  gave  to 
science  not  only  the  full  story  of  the  bacillus  of  charbon 
but  also  that  of  a  microbe  of  septicemia,  and  the  life  his- 
tory of  each  was  traced  with  a  completeness  that  made  it 
possible  to  explain  all  apparent  contradictions  and  ob- 
scurities. He  made  pure  cultures,  he  traced  the  bacillus 
through  all  its  stages,  recognized  those   in  which  it  is 


Stimson  :  Pasteur's  Life  and  Work.  17 

vulnerable  and  those  in  which  it  can  successfully  resist 
the  action  of  powerful  antiseptics,  and,  in  a  word,  discov- 
ered much  that  has  since  been  again  and  again  rediscov- 
ered and  is  often  credited  to  others.  He  even  followed 
the  bacillus  of  charbon  into  the  grave  of  its  victim,  and 
thence  through  the  bodies  of  earthworms  back  to  the  sur- 
face of  the  soil,  and  even  upon  the  blades  of  grass  that 
grew  over  it. 

Coincidently  with  the  study  of  charbon  he  carried  on 
that  of  chicken  cholera,  and  he  allowed  himself  to  step 
aside  for  a  moment  from  these  two  diseases,  which  can  be 
studied  so  thoroughly  upon  animals,  to  discover  the  mi- 
crobe of  furuncles,  of  suppuration,  and  of  osteomyelitis  in 
man.  With  the  latter  he  did  nothing  beyond  the  identi- 
fication and  the  cultivation — his  methods  of  further  study 
were  unavailable  ;  but  the  study  of  charbon  and  chicken 
cholera  was  pursued  until  he  had  discovered  and  estab- 
lished a  great  principle  whose  possibilities  for  good  elude 
«ven  the  grasp  of  the  imagination.  This  great  principle 
is  the  attenuation  of  virus,  the  reduction  of  the  virulence 
of  the  microbe  to  a  point  at  which  inoculation  with  it  will 
not  kill,  and  yet  will  confer  immunity  against  a  subse- 
quent attack.  This  discovery,  the  crowning  work  of  his 
life,  was  made,  like  all  his  others,  not  by  chance,  but  by 
prolonged  search  with  this  definite  object  in  view.  He 
had  long  meditated  on  the  immunity  against  small-pox 
conferred  by  vaccination,  and  on  the  immunity  against 
recurrence  conferred  by  a  number  of  infectious  diseases, 
and  had  sought  to  discover  how  far  the  latter  was  true  of 
the  diseases  he  was  studying.  The  first  results  were  ob- 
tained with  the  microbe  of  chicken  cholera.  If  this  mi- 
crobe is  cultivated  in  sterilized  broth  and  successive  cul- 
tures are  made  at  short  intervals,  the  virulence  remains 
unchanged  ;  a  drop  of  the  twentieth  culture  will  kill  as 
surely  as  a  drop  of  the  first.  But  if  the  interval  is  length- 
ened, if  the  second  culture  is  made  after  the  first  has 
stood  for  a  few  weeks  or  months,  its  virulence  is  less  ; 
and  if  this  second  culture  is  kept  for  a  similar  length  of 


1 8  StimsoN  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work. 

time,  the  third,  made  from  it,  will  be  less  virulent.  Inocu- 
lation  with  the  first  kills  all  the  fowls  that  are  inoculated; 
inoculation  with  the  second  kills  only  a  part  of  them  ; 
inoculation  with  the  third  kills  still  fewer ;  and  finally  a 
culture  is  obtained,  from  inoculation  with  which  all  the 
fowls  recover  after  having  been  ill  for  a  day  or  two. 
These  survivors  are  then  able  to  bear  inoculation  with 
the  strongest  culture :  they  have  acquired  immunity. 
Moreover,  the  microbes  of  diminished  virulence  thus  ob- 
tained, the  "  domesticated  "  microbes,  as  they  have  been 
called,  can  be  indefinitely  cultivated  and  continued  ;  it  is 
not  necessary  to  begin  again  with  those  of  full  virulence 
and  repeat  the  attenuation.  In  short,  a  new  disease,  or  a 
new  form  of  disease,  had  been  created,  one  that  bore  to 
chicken  cholera  the  same  prophylactic  relation  that  cow- 
pox  does  to  small-pox,  and  there  was  no  danger  that  this 
protective  disease  would  ever  disappear  and  be  lost ;  so 
long  as  chicken  cholera  existed  its  "  vaccine  "  could  be  re- 
created, if  necessary,  by  appropriate  cultivation. 

Jenner's  vaccination  against  small-pox  was  the  shrewd 
application  of  a  chance  observation  of  a  certain  relation 
between  two  existing  diseases ;  Pasteur's  discovery  of  the 
means  of  attenuating  a  virus  and  conferring  immunity 
thereby  was  effected  by  long-continued,  intelligent  ex- 
perimentation guided  by  wide  observation  and  profound 
thought.  The  former  was  the  brilliant  utilization  of  a 
fact  that  had  already  been  observed  by  others  ;  the  latter 
was  the  original  discovery  of  a  principle.  If  cow-pox 
were  to  die  out  vaccination  would  be  at  an  end,  but  in 
the  attenuation  of  a  virus  the  disease  is  made  to  protect 
against  itself :  the  bane  bears  its  own  antidote. 

Pasteur  at  once  sought  to  extend  his  study  to  other  mi- 
crobic  diseases  that  conferred  immunity  when  the  attack 
was  survived.  He  found  by  experiment  that  charbon 
was  such  an  one,  but  unfortunately  the  mode  of  develop- 
ment of  its  microbe  is  different  from  that  of  the  microbe 
of  chicken  cholera  ;  the  latter  multiplies  wholly  by  scis- 
sion,  the   former   develops   partly    by   "  spores "   which 


Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work.  19 

withstand  exposure  to  the  air  and  retain  virulence  not- 
withstanding prolonged  delay  in  cultivation.  He  was 
forced  first  to  find  a  mode  of  development  in  which  the 
spores  would  not  be  formed.  The  personal  side  of  the 
story  of  the  search  has  been  touchingly  told  by  one  of  his 
children.  Days  and  weeks  were  passed  in  experimenta- 
tion. Pasteur  became  more  and  more  absorbed  and  pre- 
occupied ;  he  went  about  with  what  his  daughter  called 
"his  expression  of  impending  discovery."  To  the  timid 
questions  of  those  who  were  waiting  and  watching  with 
so  keen  interest,  his  only  reply  was  that  he  could  not  an- 
swer, that  he  dared  not  formulate  his  hopes.  At  last  he 
returned  one  day  from  his  laboratory  in  triumph,  and 
tears  of  joy  rose  to  his  eyes  as  he  told  the  story  of  suc- 
cess. 

The  difficulty  had  been  overcome  by  cultivating  the 
germs  in  broth  at  a  temperature  of  about  108°  F.;  this 
gave  a  steadily  diminishing  virulence,  any  grade  of  which 
could  be  subsequently  maintained  by  suitable  cultivation, 
and  among  these  grades  were  some  that  were  too  weak  to 
kill  but  yet  were  strong  enough  to  protect. 

The  announcement  of  the  discovery,  on  February  28th, 
188 1,  was  promptly  followed  by  a  challenge  to  a  public 
test  that  should  prove  its  truth  or  expose  its  falsity. 
Fifty  sheep  and  ten  cows  were  provided  ;  half  of  them 
were  inoculated  with  the  attenuated  virus,  and  three 
weeks  later  all,  the  vaccinated  and  the  unvaccinated,  re- 
ceived each  an  injection  of  full  strength.  It  was  done  in 
the  presence  of  a  great  crowd  of  farmers,  veterinaries, 
physicians,  journalists,  and  legislators,  and  two  days  later 
they  reassembled  to  see  the  result.  That  result  was  a 
complete  confirmation  of  the  prediction.  Of  the  twenty- 
five  sheep  that  had  not  been  protected  by  inoculation, 
twenty-two  were  dead  and  three  were  dying  ;  the  unpro- 
tected cows  were  living,  but  evidently  very  ill ;  all  the 
protected  animals,  sheep  and  cows,  were  in  perfect 
health. 

A  veterinary  surgeon,  who  had  been  loud  in  expression 


20  Stimson  :  Pasteur's  Life  and  Work. 

of  his  disbelief,  was  so  overwhelmed  by  the  success  of  the 
demonstration  that  he  immediately  offered  himself  for 
inoculation,  and  was  saved  from  it  only  by  the  forcible 
interference  of  his  family. 

A  few  months  later  Pasteur  sent  one  of  his  assistants  to 
Berlin  to  repeat  this  demonstration  before  a  committee 
appointed  for  the  purpose,  at  his  request,  by  the  Minister 
of  Agriculture ;  the  committee,  of  which  Virchow  was  a 
member,  confirmed  his  statements  at  all  points. 

A  third  veterinary  disease,  the  measles  of  swine,  was 
next  studied,  its  microbe  discovered  and  cultivated,  its 
virulence  attenuated,  and  protection  obtained. 

It  will  be  readily  believed  that,  while  he  was  thus  so 
earnestly  and  successfully  studying  diseases  of  the  lower 
animals,  Pasteur  was  not  unmindful  of  those  affecting 
man.  As  I  have  already  mentioned,  he  had  isolated  and 
cultivated  the  microbes  of  suppuration,  of  furuncles,  and 
of  osteomyelitis,  and  in  addition  he  had  studied  those 
found  in  the  blood  of  patients  affected  with  typhoid  or 
puerperal  fever.  In  the  latter  he  had  recognized  several 
distinct  varieties — one  of  them  the  micrococcus  of  suppu- 
ration— and  in  a  communication  to  the  Academic  des 
Sciences  he  had  advised  the  employment  of  antiseptics  in 
midwifery.  He  had  already  made  the  suggestion  at  the 
Maternite,  where  it  was  followed  by  the  happiest  results. 
But  he  felt  himself  disqualified  from  pursuing  these  lines 
of  research  by  his  lack  of  training  in  medicine,  and  by 
the  impossibility  of  employing  in  them  the  instrument 
which  he  had  learned  to  handle  with  such  marvellous 
skill — experimentation.  The  only  diseases  of  man  that  he 
could  thoroughly  investigate  were  those  that  also  affected 
the  lower  animals.  One  of  these  had  attracted  his  atten- 
tion while  he  was  engaged  upon  those  that  have  been 
already  mentioned,  and  when  that  work  was  finished  he 
gave  himself  up  wholly  to  it ;  and  during  the  last  few 
years  it  has  become  the  one  subject  with  which  his  name 
is  chiefly  associated  in  the  minds  of  all  save  those  who  are 
professionally  familiar  with   his   other  work.     There   is 


Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work.  2i 

much  in  this  fact,  too,  that  is  saddening,  for  in  connection 
with  it  he  has  suffered  much,  like  other  benefactors  of  the 
world,  from  those  who,  honestly  perhaps,  but  none  the 
less  cruelly,  ignorantly,  and  blindly,  have  grossly  mis- 
stated his  results  and  misrepresented  both  him  and  his 
methods. 

This  disease  is  hydrophobia.  His  study  of  it  was  seri- 
ously hampered  at  first  by  the  difficulty  of  obtaining  a 
pure  culture  of  the  microbe  from  the  saliva  and  by  the 
great  length  of  the  period  of  incubation  under  the  then 
known  methods  of  inoculation.  He  finally  obtained  the 
microbes  from  the  nerve  centres  of  animals  dead  of  the 
disease,  and  made  his  cultures,  not  in  flasks  of  sterile 
broth  as  he  had  done  with  the  microbes  of  other  diseases, 
but  in  the  bodies  of  other  living  animals.  He  found  that 
in  a  rabbit,  inoculated  from  a  rabid  dog,  the  period  of  in- 
cubation was  fourteen  days ;  successive  inoculations  from 
rabbit  to  rabbit  gradually  reduced  this  period  to  a  week, 
and  when  some  eighty  or  ninety  successive  inoculations 
had  been  made  (covering  a  period  of  more  than  two  years) 
he  had  obtained  a  disease  of  uniform  virulence.  That  is, 
if  a  small  portion  of  the  spinal  cord  of  a  rabbit  that  had 
just  died  of  this  disease  was  mixed  with  a  little  water  and 
injected  into  a  vein  of  another  animal,  the  latter  would 
certainly  develop  and  die  of  the  disease.  He  then  sought 
to  attenuate  this  virus  so  as  to  make  it  protective,  and 
he  found  that  thijs  could  be  accomplished  by  drying  the 
spinal  cord  ;  that  if  an  animal  received  successive  injec- 
tions, under  the  skin,  of  portions  of  cords  that  had  been 
dried  in  sterilized  air  for  shorter  and  shorter  periods,  be- 
ginning with  fourteen  days,  it  could  ultimately  receive 
with  impunity  an  injection  of  full  strength.  He  found, 
next,  that  the  protective  action  of  these  inoculations  was 
more  rapid  than  the  deadly  action  of  the  poison  intro- 
duced by  the  bite  of  a  rabid  dog ;  that,  in  other  words, 
an  animal  that  had  been  recently  bitten  by  a  rabid  dog 
could  be  saved  from  rabies  by  these  inoculations. 

But  to  extend  this  protection  from  animals  to  man  was 


\ 


22  Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work. 

a  step  which  he  long  hesitated  to  take.  It  was  at  last, 
in  a  measure,  forced  upon  him.  On  the  morning  of  July 
4th,  1885,  a  little  boy  on  his  way  to  his  school  in  a  village 
of  Alsace  was  attacked  and  severely  bitten  by  a  rabid 
dog.  A  physician  cauterized  the  wounds  with  carbolic 
acid  and  advised  the  parents  to  take  the  child  to  Paris, 
/  where,  as  he  said,  was  the  only  man  who  could  do  any- 
J  thing  for  him ;  he  lived  in  the  Rue  d'Ulm,  and  his  name 
was  Pasteur.  The  advice  was  followed,  and  on  the  morn- 
ing of  July  6th  the  mother  and  child  presented  themselves 
at  the  laboratory.  Pasteur,  deeply  moved  by  the  distress 
of  the  parent  and  strong  in  the  confidence  his  experiments 
had  created,  asked  the  advice  of  two  professors  in  the 
School  of  Medicine  who  were  familiar  with  his  investiga- 
tions. Both  approved  of  the  attempt,  and  the  lad  received 
his  first  injection  that  same  day.  On  each  succeeding 
day  another  and  more  virulent  inoculation  was  made ; 
and  as  the  danger,  if  danger  there  was,  was  thus  daily 
increasing,  so  increased  likewise  the  anxiety  of  Pasteur. 
His  days  were  agitated,  his  nights  sleepless ;  and  even 
long  after  the  treatment  had  ended  and  the  child  had  re- 
turned to  his  home  Pasteur  wrote  to  him  every  week,  and 
then  every  fortnight,  for  news  of  his  well-being. 

Thus  began  the  application  of  the  remedy  to  man.  The 
announcement  of  its  success  to  the  Academie  des  Sciences 
created  a  profound  sensation  ;  and  when  a  second  pa- 
tient came  to  Paris  for  treatment — a  brave  young  shep- 
herd who  had  been  bitten  while  defending  some  children 
from  a  rabid  dog — the  public  press  was  filled  with  ac- 
counts of  it,  and  for  the  time  it  was  the  topic  of  chief  in- 
terest in  the  city.  This  interest  promptly  brought  an 
important  practical  result.  The  number  of  patients  ap- 
plying for  treatment  became  far  too  great  for  the  limited 
accommodations  of  the  Ecole  Normale,  and  a  public  sub- 
scription was  opened,  under  the  auspices  of  the  Academie 
des  Sciences,  for  the  erection  of  a  special  building  for  the 
treatment  of  the  bitten  and  for  bacteriological  study  of 
infectious  diseases.     Subscriptions  to  this  fund  poured  in 


Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work.  23 

from  all  quarters  ;  one  of  the  largest  gifts  came  from  the 
Czar,  in  recognition  of  the  saving  of  the  lives  of  sixteen 
Russians  who  had  been  bitten  by  a  rabid  wolf ;  another 
came  from  the  Emperor  of  Brazil,  in  recognition  of  the 
high  scientific  value  of  the  work  ;  another  from  Alsace- 
Lorraine,  from  which  had  come  Pasteur's  first  patient ; 
and  a  multitude  of  others  from  corporations  and  in- 
dividuals throughout  France.  As  has  been  said  by  a 
biographer,  this  time  the  prophet  was  not  without  honor 
in  his  own  country.  Far  from  it !  In  May,  1886,  a  festival 
was  given  at  the  Trocadero  in  aid  of  the  Institut  Pasteur, 
at  which  the  greatest  celebrities  of  the  literary,  musical, 
and  theatrical  world  of  Paris  assisted  ;  and  when  Coque- 
lin  recited  a  poem  in  honor  of  the  Master,  the  audience 
rose  and  joined  in  the  greatest  ovation  that  had  ever  been 
offered  to  a  man  of  science. 

But  this  subject,  interesting  as  it  is,  must  not  now  be 
followed  further.  The  Institut  Pasteur  was  established, 
and  during  the  years  1 886-1 891  there  were  treated  within 
it  11,029  individuals  who  had  been  bitten  by  rabid  ani- 
mals. Of  these  98  have  died.  I  quote  from  a  report  of 
the  Board  of  Health  of  the  city  of  Paris.^  Comparing 
this  mortality  of  less  than  one  per  cent  (0.88  per  cent) 
with  the  mortality  among  those  not  treated,  as  ascer- 
tained by  the  authorities  of  the  city  of  Paris  for  the  years 
1887  (15.90  per  cent)  and  1888  (13.33  per  cent),  or  with 
that  given  by  medical  writers  (15  per  cent),  it  appears 
that  the  work  of  this  charity  has  already  resulted  in  the 
saving  of  about  1,500  men,  women,  and  children  from 
death  in  one  of  its  most  terrible  forms.  In  reply  to  a 
question  addressed  him  a  few  weeks  ago,  M.  Pasteur 
writes  me  that  during  the  year  1891  201  persons  living  in 
Paris  were  treated  at  the  Institut,  with  no  deaths,  and 
that  during  the  same  period,  in  the  same  city,  four  persons 
had  died  of  hydrophobia  from  among  the  very  limited 


^  Rapport  sur  ]es  cas  de  rage  humaine  constates  dans  le  Departement  de  la 
Seine  de  1880  a  1891.     Conseil  d'hygiene  publique  et  de  salubrite,  1892. 


24  Stimson  :  Pasteur's  Life  and  Work. 

number  of  those  who  had  been  bitten  and  haci  not  been 
treated  by  inoculation.  In  addition  to  these  201  Parisians 
more  than  1,300  other  patients,  coming  from  greater  or 
less  distances,  were  treated  at  the  Institut  Pasteur  during 
the  year,  and  similar  institutions  have  been  at  work  in 
seventeen  other  cities. 

It  would  be  interesting  and  profitable  to  study  in  detail 
the  means  and  the  methods  by  which  these  vast  results 
have  been  obtained,  but  time  forbids  more  than  a  brief 
reference  to  them. 

Of  his  method,  the  experimental  method,  which  he 
used  with  such  transcendent  skill ;  the  method  handed 
down  to  us  by  the  great  experimenters  of  the  past — Gali- 
leo, Pascal,  Newton — he  has  given  us  a  description  and 
an  appreciation.  "  Admirable  and  sovereign  method,"  he 
calls  it,  "  which  is  always  guided  and  controlled  by  ob- 
servation and  experience  freed  from  every  metaph3^sical 
conclusion  ;  a  method  so  fruitful  that  great  minds,  dazzled 
by  its  conquests,  have  believed  that  it  could  solve  all 
problems. 

"  One  can  do  nothing  without  preconceived  ideas,  but 
we  must  have  the  wisdom  to  believe  in  their  deductions 
only  so  far  as  experience  confirms  them.  Preconceived 
ideas,  under  the  rigid  control  of  experimentation,  are  the 
vivifying  flame  of  the  sciences  of  observation  ;  their  dan- 
ger is  in  fixed  ideas.  Do  you  remember  Bossuet's  fine 
saying  :  '  The  greatest  disordering  of  the  mind  is  to  be- 
lieve that  things  are  because  one  wishes  them  to  be  '  ?  To 
enter  upon  a  path,  and  to  stop  every  moment  to  make 
sure  you  are  not  going  astray — that  is  the  true  method." 

In  these  impatient  times  such  a  method  seems  all  too 
slow  ;  but  see  how  far  and  how  safely  it  has  taken  him. 
Doubtless  his  mistakes,  his  false  routes,  might  be  counted 
b}^  thousands ;  but  he  himself  detected  and  corrected 
them,  and  no  step  definitively  taken  has  ever  had  to  be 
retraced,  no  statement  that  he  has  ever  made  has  proved 
to  be  incorrect.  His  caution  in  approaching  a  conclusion 
is  equalled  only  by  his  assurance  after  it  has  been  reached  ; 


Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work.  25 

each  is  absolute.  His  comments  upon  puerperal  fever 
were  made  almost  with  an  apology.  "  I  tell  you  these 
things,"  he  said,  "  as  they  appear  to  me.  But  I  do  not  for- 
get that  I  am  ignorant  of  medical  science,  and  I  earnestly 
ask  for  your  judgment  and  your  criticism."  How  different 
his  tone  when  he  felt  himself  master  of  the  subject ! 
"  What !  "  he  cried  with  magnificent  scorn  one  day  in  the 
Academie  de  Medicine — "  what !  Do  you  say  that  I  may 
have  worked  twenty  years  on  a  subject  and  yet  should 
hold  no  opinion  on  it  ;  that  the  right  to  verify,  to  control, 
to  discuss,  to  interrogate,  shall  belong  only  to  him  who 
does  nothing  to  throw  light  upon  it,  to  him  who,  with  his 
feet  on  the  fender  in  his  library,  has  only  read,  with  more 
or  less  attention,  the  results  of  my  labor  ?  You  say  that 
in  the  present  state  of  science  it  is  the  part  of  wisdom  to 
hold  no  opinion  [on  spontaneous  generation].  Well,  as 
for  me,  I  hold  one,  for  I  have  earned  the  right  to  hold  it 
by  twenty  years  of  assiduous  labor  ;  and  it  would  be  well 
for  every  impartial  mind  to  share  it." 

To  those  who  were  not  aware  of  the  thought  and  labor 
upon  which  it  rested,  such  absolute  confidence  might 
seem  foolhardy  and  arrogant;  but  those  who  tested  it 
soon  learned  to  respect  it,  and  those  who  had  once  met 
hira  in  debate  shrank  from  again  falling  into  his  redoubt- 
able hands.  "  Come  with  me,"  said  a  man  once — "  come 
with  me  to  the  Academy  and  see  me  strangle  Pasteur." 
"  Take  care,"  was  the  reply — "  take  care,  my  friend. 
Pasteur  is  a  man  who  makes  no  mistakes." 

Absolutely  open  and  sincere,  solicitous  only  that  the 
truth  should  be  known,  he  never  hesitated  to  make  public 
his  reasons  and  his  processes,  to  submit  them  to  any  open 
test,  and  to  stand  or  fall  by  the  result.  When  the  dis- 
cussion on  fermentation  was  at  its  height,  Pasteur  went 
in  person  to  Munich  to  show  his  experiments  to  Liebig. 
When  spontaneous  generation  was  in  question,  Pouchet 
was  invited  to  make  experiments  in  concert  with  him. 

Challenged  to  a  test  upon  a  large  scale  of  his  proposed 
treatment  of  the  silkworm  disease,  he  had  himself  carried 


26  Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work. 

upon  a  mattress  across  France  and  Italy  tc?' Austria,  and 
from  an  estate  which  had  not  previously  been  able  to 
raise  enough  silk  to  pay  for  the  eggs  they  had  to  import, 
he  there  made  in  one  season  a  net  profit  of  twenty-six 
thousand  francs. 

We  have  seen  his  public  tests  at  Paris  and  Berlin  with 
the  attenuated  virus  of  charbon.  When  Koch  at  that 
time  said  that  the  theory  of  attenuation  was  too  good  to 
be  true,  Pasteur  sought  him  at  a  scientific  meeting  at 
Geneva  and  publicly  challenged  him  to  a  discussion. 
Koch  declined,  saying  he  would  reply  in  print.  A  few 
months  later  he  published  a  pamphlet  accepting  the  dis- 
covery as  one  of  the  highest  scientific  value. 

Few  men  have  had  so  many  scientific  controversies,  and 
no  one,  perhaps,  has  come  out  of  them  so  uniformly  suc- 
cessful and  with  his  success  so  uniformly  conceded.  The 
latter  fact  is  due  in  part  to  the  resolution  with  which 
Pasteur  has  held  himself  and  his  opponents  down  to 
statements  capable  of  proof  or  disproof.  Sooner  or  later 
the  debate  would  reach  a  point  at  which  he  could  force 
an  issue  on  some  one  decisive  fact,  and  then  he  always 
demanded  the  appointment  of  a  committee  to  determine 
that  fact. 

Heated  as  these  discussions  often  were,  ardent  as  was 
his  support  of  his  own  views,  and  pitiless  as  was  his  expo- 
sure of  error,  it  is  a  pleasure  to  note  that  on  his  side  the 
personal  element,  in  the  unworthy  sense,  is  always  ab- 
sent. His  interest  is  in  the  truth,  not  in  himself ;  and  if 
he  is  intolerant  of  frivolous  or  prejudiced  contradiction, 
if  he  grows  impatient  at  times  over  the  mental  sluggish- 
ness of  those  who  can  only  grope  and  crawl  where  he  has 
run,  it  is  only  because  of  his  burning  zeal  for  the  estab- 
lishment and  the  advancement  of  the  truth. 

The  work  that  we  have  thus  followed  has  been  done  in 
almost  exactly  a  half-century  of  life,  the  period  between 
the  ages  of  twenty  and  seventy  years.  And  how  magnifi- 
cent it  is  when  it  is  summed  up  ! 

In  science  he  has  laid  at  rest  the  theory  of  spontaneous 


Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work.  2/ 

generation  which  for  centuries  had  blinded  and  misled, 
and  in  its  place  he  has  given  us  a  new  world,  that  of  "  the 
infinitely  small  ";  he  has  made  clear  the  nature  of  fermen- 
tation, and  by  that  explanation  he  has  brought  into  one 
group  of  exquisite  simplicity  what  had  previously  been  a 
chaotic  mass  of  unrelated  processes  and  changes. 

In  medicine  he  has  given  us  the  science  of  Bacteri- 
ology ;  he  laid  the  foundations  of  antiseptic  surgery,  by 
which  hundreds  of  thousands  of  lives  and  countless  limbs 
have  been  saved  ;  he  demonstrated  the  microbic  nature  of 
certain  diseases,  and  he  gave  us  the  principle  of  protec- 
tion by  an  attenuated  virus  with  its  vast  possibilities  for 
good,  and  he  has  himself  applied  that  principle  in  one  dis- 
ease to  save  from  a  terrible  death  hundreds  of  our  fellow- 
creatures. 

I  hesitate  to  close  such  a  record  with  a  reference  to 
material  gains,  and  yet,  in  the  words  of  Prof.  Huxley, 
Pasteur's  discoveries  would  be  sufficient  in  themselves 
to  make  good  the  war  indemnity  of  five  thousand  million 
francs  paid  by  France  to  Germany. 

In  the  address  which  he  made  ten  years  ago  on  his  re- 
ception into  the  French  Academy,  after  an  eloquent  de- 
claration of  his  faith  in  God,  his  belief  in  immortality,  and 
his  conviction  of  the  reality  of  those  lofty  preoccupations 
which  are  put  aside  as  non-existent  by  the  positivists, 
Pasteur  said  : 

"  The  Greeks  understood  the  mysterious  power  of  these 
hidden  things.  They  gave  us  one  of  the  most  beauti- 
ful words  in  our  language,  enthusiasm — iv  dso?,  a  god 
within. 

"  The  grandeur  of  human  actions  is  measured  by  the 
inspiration  which  gives  rise  to  them.  Happy  is  he  who 
bears  within  himself  a  god,  an  ideal  of  beauty,  and  who 
obeys  it — ideal  of  art,  ideal  of  science,  ideal  of  patriotism, 
ideal  of  the  virtues  of  the  Gospel.  Those  are  the  living 
springs  of  great  thoughts  and  great  deeds." 


28  Stimson  :  Pasteur  s  Life  and  Work. 

Pasteur's  whole  life  has  shown  that  he  possesses  such 
an  ideal  and  that  it  directs  every  act. 

May  the  happiness  that  he  predicated  of  such  a  posses- 
sion, the  happiness  that  he  has  so  abundantly  earned  by 
his  devotion  to'  the  truth  and  by  the  benefits  he  has  con- 
ferred, be  his  reward  ! 


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